The present invention is directed to an apparatus that provides enhanced functionality for a mobile station. More particularly, the present invention is directed to an apparatus that provides a base unit to which a mobile station can be coupled to increase the functionality of the mobile station in accordance with features available in the base unit.
The communications industry continues to see explosive growth in the area of wireless communications. Such communications have a number of advantages including the fact that wireless communications do not require the same amount of infrastructure for installation as do wired communication networks. Also, wireless communications lend themselves to the use of mobile stations which can be moved throughout a service area.
As wireless systems have become more and more prominent, their uses in different contexts have also been considered. As an example, it has already been disclosed to provide a wireless communication system that corresponds to the functionality of equipment commonly referred to as PBXs or private branch exchanges. Examples of prior art wireless PBX configurations are illustrated in FIG. 1 and 2.
For instance, a station in a wireless PBX environment may be a mobile station such as 10 in FIG. 1. The mobile station could be moved throughout the area (such as a building or campus) serviced by the wireless PBX which could in turn provide certain PBX functionality to the various stations. An alternative configuration is represented in FIG. 2 where a PBX featured desk-set phone, 20, that is not intended to be fully mobile can also communicate via wireless links with a wireless PBX, 21, to provide PBX functionality. An example of such a desk set is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,465,401 to Thompson.
The above two configurations have limitations, however. In the first system the nature of the handheld device 10 in providing a smaller size to facilitate portability results in a rather limited feature set which can be made available through the handheld device that interacts with the wireless PBX. Also, that feature set tends to be a static feature set defined for the handset. The desk-set configuration has its own limitations in that while it may have sufficient additional memory and processing capability to provide a full complement of PBX functions, it does not have the mobility that the stations or devices of FIG. 1 have because it must include extra processing and memory to be able to provide the full feature set of functions.
It would be advantageous if an apparatus was provided that enabled both a full PBX feature set and yet provided some degree of mobility, thus improving on the configurations of FIG. 1 and FIG. 2.